IBM India organized IBM Developer Day in Bengaluru at Taj Yeshwantpur on 14th March 2019. This is a Developer Day by the Developers for the Developers. We at Technary were fortunate to witness the latest into development by IBM at the IBM Developer Day.
Technology is rapidly evolving and the backend of any technology or the pillars of the technology are the developers. We had high hopes that on the IBM Developer Day we would be able to meet such enthusiastic developers and gain valuable knowledge in the field of recent developments in Blockchain, AI, IoT, Cloud, etc.
Registration
The Day started off with participants coming from various parts of the country. There were also international delegates attending the event. Already the event was sold out and over 1000 attendees attended the event. All the participants were enthusiastic developers who were wanting to enrich their knowledge.
Interesting part at registration was that using Watson’s facial recognition capabilities, attendees were able to generate the badges at the registration. So right at the beginning of the venue they smartly integrated Watson’s facial recognition technology for the help of smoother registration of so many participants.
Apart from the physical attendance the event was streaming live which helped many other developers to gain knowledge remotely. This is really a great initiative by IBM to spread the knowledge and creating awareness among the developer community.
Sessions
Various sessions took place at the event. These sessions were subject based. Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM keynote session was superb. She talked about IBM’s ecosystem. The commitment towards open source development is exemplary.
“We’re here to enable the largest ecosystem possible.” – Gini Rometty
She also shared 3 Principles of OpenSource:
- Ecosystem Enablement
- Giveback to Opensource
- Open Governance
The panel discussion with the dev ecosystem representatives was also amazing. GSI, RBS and open source community Linux Foundation representatives had a great discussion with Ginni Rometty in a panel discussion about growing the Open source community at large.
“AI Explainability is critical for adoption for AI especially in regulated industries.” – Ginni Rometty
Also there was a fun activity where 1000+ people in the crowd driving a car together using AI on the screen. This is just unbelievable and the technology is certainly shaping up.
“Generating ideas is not enough. We live in the world that has AI enabled everything. Let’s put smart to work for not just few of us but all of us.” – Bob Lord, SVP of IBM Cognitive Applications.
No Technology will stop a natural disaster. But we can definitely code to prepare for one. – Willie Tejada, Developer Advocate, IBM
India can be the SaaS capital of the world five years from now. – KS Vishwanathan, VP(industry initiatives), NASSCOM
Sriram Raghavan, VP, IMB Research AI talked about “Why is it exciting to be a developer” and about the ways technology can solve problems faced by society.
Demos
People flocked down at the demos. So there were demonstrations of various technologies explained by the experts. This was very much interesting for the people as they get to see the capabilities of the technologies. The setup of the demos and everything was amazing.
Code Cafe
At Code Cafe the participants were able participate in the hands-on coding sessions. There were various labs at the CodeCafe. So anyone can go there are join the coding sessions. Best part is that you can Ask your queries directly to the IBM experts who were very generous to share their knowledge about the technology. This is something exquisite and it really helps how you can use the available open source technology provided by IBM to curate your ideas into reality.
TJ Robot
This was certainly the center of attraction of the event. The TJBot is a AI robot built using IBM Watson services. This is really an amazing technology where the robot kit is made up of IBM Watson, Raspberry Pi and the Communication Client. It was amazing to interact with the TJBot. Before giving the actual commands you can try it out in the virtual environment which is certainly important for the developers.
The TJBot is able to do a lot of things, like text to speech. It supports various languages and can be immediately convert once sentence from one language to another. Apart from that it does do mechanical hand movement by giving it command verbally. So you can imagine that the applications are endless after enhancing this bot. It was also connected to a camera and it is able to give amazing data.
So it can tell the color of the shirt and handheld or electronic devices, etc in the image. IBM Watson is really amazing as it immediately does visual recognition and tells the details of the person. The TJBot is really revolutionary and its applications are endless for sure which is powered by IBM Watson.
War of Minds
This was also one of the most innovative place to be at the event. Similar to Tug of War this is War of Minds where the one who concentrates more will win. This was an amazing battle. I also participated in it and yes, such technology will help to sharpen the young minds. So you are equipped with the equipment and you got to focus on the football. The more you focus the more are your chances to win means to score a goal.
Code Cafe
In the Code Cafe there were many workshop zones where the participants can code together for a purpose. Some of topics were Text summarization and visualization using IBM Watson Studio.
Watson machine learning accelerator to build AI based Enterprise applications. There were also booths for Trying out the IBM Blockchain Platform. There was also a lab where in you can Try out Hyperledger Fabric with java/Node SDK.
Another interesting part was Explainability of AI Model Behaviour with Watson OpenScale. The overall theme of the event is BuldSmart and really you can build smart applications using the IBM cloud, watson, blockchain, etc. There were live sessions of AI. Black Box Shattered: Achieving Trusted AI with IBM Watson OpenScale by Manish Bhide.
There was also a VRChallenge lounge where the coder heroes challenged for installing servers using VR. This was interesting Server VR challenge using IBM cloud.
Certification
In this event you can also do your professional development by participating in certification exams and hands-on labs. There were certification programs inside the event. They were IBM Cloud Application Development v3. IBM Watson Application Development V3.1, Apache Spartk 1.6 Developer. So people who have knowledge in the above fields can come nad give exam and can get certified by IBM. This is a major boost for your developer career indeed.
Musical Night
After a day long of activities it was time for some entertainment. A local musical band Lagori entertained the crowd playing Hindi and Kannada songs. People enjoyed the music and it was some electrifying performances indeed. Worth attending the conference and then getting entertained by such music was soothing.
Developer Advocacy
IBM has an excellent Developer Advocacy Program. So if you want to be a developer who is enthusiastic about cloud, AI, Blockchain, etc then you must check IBM Advocacy Program. Here you will get a lot of knowledge and help in your process of learning and building applications. There is a huge community of IBM Developers. You can join it at developer.ibm.com
IBM has created various resources for the developers. So you can learn the coding and also get valuable guidance from such valuable source. Apart from the online platform IBM is working in spreading the Developer Advocacy across globe. There are Hackathons organized by IBM. Also there are workshops and programs in college levels. This will help in nourishing young talent and will help in your developer career.
Key Takeaways from IBM Developer Day 2019:
- Technology is the way or medium to solve real world problems.
- Adopting open Source technology helps to get more developers on board.
- Easy access to resources like IBM Code Patterns help developers to gain valuable knowledge while building applications.
- TJ Robot applications are endless, so it may be for Health, Education, Finance, etc. It is a powerful tool for using IBM Watson on optimum level to solve problems.
- Getting the right knowledge from experts is essential to grow as a developer.
- Early adopters always have upper edge in future. As a developer you have to consistently learn new things and adopt quickly.
- Selecting the right Use Cases for the development process is important.
- Networking with fellow developers and making new connections can help you grow in your developer career.
- A developer may get actual direction on which technology or on who to focus on in the upcoming days.
- Not only using Open Source, but spreading your knowledge to other developers is important to grow the community.
- Finally after having an amazing day at IBM Developer Day, there was a great addition of knowledge. So you get to know about the latest things in technology and meet some amazing people around.
- If you are a developer never miss out such events in the future.
Nikhil Narkhede
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